It slipped by us, but the KDE team has released another minor bugfix release of KDE 4.2, version 4.2.3, a few days ago. Being a bugfix release, there are few user-visible changes, but still, there are a few things that stand out. "Online IMAP filtering in KMail has been fixed, KMail's system tray icon now reacts to changes to folder properties and updates the number of emails shown there automatically, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML - painting and interoperability with web standards has been further improved."

"2. So I compiled everything 32-bit on the same platform. Managed to get kde-4 up and running and it wasn't pretty. I mean it was so hideously slow, it was painfull to look at. ...

3. Finally I tought, I'll give it a go on i386. Got it up and running on dual 1GHz Pentium 3 machine. No crashes thankfully, but it was still hideously slow. I mean seriously, what idiots design such bloatware. I don't have a freaking mainframe sitting in my garage to run that crap.

I have also compared the memory consumption of a clean install Ubuntu 9.04 vs Kubuntu 9.04 and the later consumed a couple of tens MBs LESS. That was a surprise for me as I have always been thinking that KDE was heavier than Gnome. "

KDE4 will "win" over GNOME provided your system has a graphics GPU. The better the GPU and driver, the more pronounced will be the advantage to KDE4.

The Intel graphics found in most netbooks is not that flash, but nevertheless it IS a hardware-accelerated graphics GPU with a working driver. I would expect KDE4 to have a small but noticeable speed edge over GNOME on such a system.

Caveat: Because KDE4 expects its font rendering and drawing to be hardware-accelerated, it actually does attempt to do a lot more font rendering and drawing. As an experiment, re-size a Konqueor window on a KDE3 machine, and then do the same on a KDE4 machine. On KDE3, an outline of the Window at its new size will be drawn until you let the mouse button go, when the complete window is re-drawn at its new size. Once. On KDE4, the windows is continuously re-drawn over and over at differing sizes to "animate" the re-size operation.

If the graphics is not accelerated ... KDE4 will appear to run much slower as it does a lot more window re-draws.